Iranian Female Professor Wins Top Math Prize

Mirzakhani, a professor of mathematics at Stanford University in California, was named the first woman to win the world's most prestigious mathematics prize since the award was established nearly 80 years ago.

Known as the "Nobel Prize of mathematics", the award was given to Professor Mirzakhani at the International Congress of Mathematicians, held in the South Korean capital of Seoul on Wednesday morning.

"This is a great honor. I will be happy if it encourages young female scientists and mathematicians," Mirzakhani said. "I am sure there will be many more women winning this kind of award in coming years."

The award recognizes Mirzakhani's sophisticated and highly original contributions to the fields of geometry and dynamical systems, particularly in understanding the symmetry of curved surfaces, such as spheres, the surfaces of doughnuts and of hyperbolic objects.

Although her work is considered "pure mathematics" and is mostly theoretical, it has implications for physics and quantum field theory.

Mirzakhani became known to the international math scene as a teenager, winning gold medals at both the 1994 and 1995 International Math Olympiads.

After earning her bachelor's degree from Tehran’s Sharif University of Technology in 1999, she began work on her doctorate at Harvard University under the guidance of Fields Medal recipient Curtis McMullen.

She possesses a remarkable fluency in a diverse range of mathematical techniques and disparate mathematical cultures, including algebra, calculus, complex analysis and hyperbolic geometry. By borrowing principles from several fields, she has brought a new level of understanding to an area of mathematics called low dimensional topology, according to Stanford University website.

From 2004 to 2008, she was a Clay Mathematics Institute Research Fellow and an assistant professor at Princeton University. In 2008, she became a professor of mathematics at Stanford.